The server is now the only one that keeps track of spending and getting money

Improved the detailed grass transition and visibility of height differences

F12 toggles the overlay on/off

The minimap show/hide is saved when logging out

If you finish a stack of seeds and have more in the inventory the seeds are automatically refilled

Improved the prices to be less extreme in the center and in the huge plots in the outskirts

You can now buy bread in the shop. If you eat bread you can plant seeds/harvest grain for 5 minutes, or until logging out, while holding in the button instead of clicking constantly

Fixed several bugs

The next things to be implemented, except for performance and bug fixes, is a mill to seperate the wheat from the chaff, a mill to grind the wheat into flour, a well to get water and an oven to bake your own bread. Once you can bake bread yourself it will be removed from the store.

First of all, a list of changes since my last post:The compass window shows you the distance to your destinationThe compass window shows you your current positionYou can enter a custom destination into the compass windowIncreased the performance (from 40 to 100 fps on my laptop with high settings for example)Decreased the stuttering when buildingImproved the floor/wall logic so you don't have to build floors that stick out through the walls on buildings (caused some graphical glitches, fixed soon)Added grain threshers so you can turn wheat into wheat seeds and hay (hay will later be used for feeding animals)Added flour mills so you can turn wheat seeds into flourAdded wells so you can get waterAdded ovens so you can turn water, logs and flour into breadAdded a shopkeeper you can buy where you can place, and price, items to sell to other peopleFixed bugs

Secondly, and maybe more interesting for the border searching junkies we are. I'm currently working on dynamic shadows. It was a lot more work than I thought it would be (took me like two weeks of almost every evening) but I'll probably be able to upload an almost complete version in the weekend.

Here are some screenshots:

If any of you are looking into implementing shadows in your own game just ask any question and I'll answer to the best of my knowledge.

Hi Mike, the shadow in your last screenshots looks really detailed. Can I ask if you are using shadow mapping or shadow volume? If it is shadow mapping, what resolution do you use for the shadow buffer?

This is how the launcher turned out. It has a couple of handy features like if I want the game to download another jar file for example I just need to define it on the server and the client will understand it. The server reads the modified date of the files to check if there are new files instead of me having to keep track of some version number or so. It also only downloads the files needed for your specific OS and it picks up your java path automatically. It fetches the news from the website and sends your password md5'ed.

There are still some things to fix in the game itself to make it run good as a standalone application instead of an applet, but that should be doable quite quickly.

Yeah I read that websites tutorial and am still lost. He has good tutorials though. One thing I found funny is that on his particles tutorial his example image of a particle animation sheet is some of the output from my SystemX editor I uploaded. Freaking awesome.

I just finished the last part of the website and put it online. The following things changed since the last update post:

Completely new websiteA new game forumChanged from an applet to a downloadable programAdded dynamic soft shadowsYou can now change resolutionThe game can now automatically start up in full screen modeYou can now quit the game while in full screen modeIf you forget your password you can reset it (for the current players, if you want to use the functionality please IM me your email address over one of the forums and I'll add it to the database)You can now choose gender when you create a new account. It doesn't do anything yet though, but I'll add that shortly. For the current players, let me know if you want to be shown as a female (I defaulted everyone to man).Improved performanceFixed bugs

If you find any new bugs, please let me know on the game forum so we don't have to spam JGO.

I'll head back into the code of the game itself again now that the main things around it has been taken care of.

Kind regards,Mike

EDIT: One of the computers at home has problems with the full screen mode, if it isn't working for you please change it to windowed mode in the options of the launcher until I fixed it.

After a lot of relatives visiting during Christmas and New Years I ended up adding normal mapping today. It wasn't as difficult as I had thought and even though the effect is subtle it makes a nice impact while playing.

Here is a with and without screenshot (It is currenty turned on when you turn on shadows and/or high quality ground, so only look at the texture difference):

And here is a full hd screenshot of how the game looks like now (click for full quality):

Some better shading would take the feel of the game to a whole new level, and what you've done there is a pretty good start.

Two types I would recommend are ambient occlusion (probably in the form of SSAO) and normal-mapping your textures.Those two together make the difference between a 2D sheet with a wall texture and real-looking 3D wall.

Some better shading would take the feel of the game to a whole new level, and what you've done there is a pretty good start.

Two types I would recommend are ambient occlusion (probably in the form of SSAO) and normal-mapping your textures.Those two together make the difference between a 2D sheet with a wall texture and real-looking 3D wall.

As usual, amazing work!

Thanks!

The normal mapping is what I just added (although I am aware that the normal maps aren't the best, I just generated them from the textures). Somewhere down the line I'll go ahead and get an artist make me some really nice textures with fitting normal maps instead of the random ones I have at the moment.

It's not the first time that someone says SSAO, I had a look at it but didn't understand anything, maybe I'll look at it again to see if I can make any sense out of how to implement it

Heh I was just about to suggest the same thing. SSAO is a complicated shader, and it destroys performance if done incorrectly but it is worth it in the end. Try adding in bloom as well, it's probably one of the most simple post processing effects you can do and it adds quite a bit to the game. For example, here is the very first bloom shader I made:

Of course to get a nicer effect you would probably need a two pass Gaussian blur unless you want to do the blur in one pass, which isn't very good performance-wise.Finally, check out parallax mapping, it's another really nice effect. Simple as well.

Good job on your game, it looks really nice!

Edit:From your images I can't tell if you already have this, but try adding in some "froth" where water touches land, it would make it look a million times better. Unless of course if you already added it, as I said I couldn't tell.

Was I before Chuang Tzu who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being Chuang Tzu?

From your images I can't tell if you already have this, but try adding in some "froth" where water touches land, it would make it look a million times better. Unless of course if you already added it, as I said I couldn't tell.

I indeed didn't add that. Again mainly as I wouldn't know how to, but if I get some freeze and want to dive into something really difficult it is one of the effects that I'd like to add

That was more of a blur than a bloom shader. It made everything look... blurry I considered adding such a filter for items far away, but never really got to it.

I don't think you quite understand bloom shaders What happens is the shader loops through the horizontal axis 5 times and the vertical axis 5 times and adds those samples together. This, indeed, is a blur. However the final bit (gl_FragColor = (final / 25) + color) adds the blur to the color of the pixel it is on, making any lighter pixels "bleed" into the current fragment. Maybe you are not setting the sampler2d correctly? I know it's elementary but try just setting gl_FragColor to color. If the scene looks completely normal the color is being calculated correctly (I know you probably already did this).

Anyways, you should end up with something like this (this is a test scene for my playing around with shaders):

as I said this is a messy implementation and you can certainly improve on it but it will give you a taste for what it'll look like.

Was I before Chuang Tzu who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being Chuang Tzu?

I tried out a few different bloom effects but I didn't really like it. It might look nice for a short while when walking outside from a dark area for example, but it's not worth the performance hit of having it on all the time. I also found a nice artist and will try out if he can improve the textures and make better normal maps.

I improved some things around the SSAO like allowing for anti aliasing (made it a little bit slower though), made it an option and uploaded it to the live game.

Here is the last screenshot for a while, thank you for pushing me! Just like every screenshot I posted you can click it for a bigger version. The grass used to look okay, but with the other improvements it is now the least good looking thing in the whole game

I know I said that I'd not post another picture for a while, but my artist just delivered the first two new textures with normals and... well, see for yourself!

Click for full HD glory and switch inbetween a couple of times to see the improvement.

The new textures are 256x256 per block instead of 128x128 (which increases the download with 10mb, so I'll make it an optional download). Safe to say though, I'll always play with them on! I also cranked up the normal map contribution seeing as his normal maps are of much better quality than mine.

Do you already use DXT compressed textures? They will cut down enormously on the file size.Do you create the normal/alpha mip-maps correctly?The thing with standard mip-maps for normal-maps is, that the lower mip levels will look flat. To have correct values you will need a base high-res bump-map(gray-scaled). You would than need to manually scale down this bump-map to each mip size and then convert each level to a normal-map.

Do you already use DXT compressed textures? They will cut down enormously on the file size.

Nope, I didn't even know of that until now Compressing the biggest texture brings it down from 6.5mb to 2mb. I'll see if I can figure out how to read it in, that will make a nice size difference if the quality isn't too bad!

Do you create the normal/alpha mip-maps correctly?The thing with standard mip-maps for normal-maps is, that the lower mip levels will look flat. To have correct values you will need a base high-res bump-map(gray-scaled). You would than need to manually scale down this bump-map to each mip size and then convert each level to a normal-map.

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